Does radio frequency radiation pose a cancer risk? Researchers in the largest study to date won’t say

Daniel Shattuck
calls himself a soldier, and you might assume as much from his shaved
head and six-foot, 210-pound frame. But he’s never been in the armed
forces. Instead, Shattuck has been reluctantly drafted to fight against
something in his own body: a malignant brain tumour. “To me, it’s a
war,” he says. “I’m at war with this thing every day.”

Although Shattuck doesn’t know for sure what caused his tumour—he’s
asked his doctor “a thousand times” but says he’s never received a clear
answer—he certainly has a theory: he worked as an operator and then as a
technician for a phone company for thirteen years, and regularly used a
cellphone for a good ten of them. Three of his former co-workers also
have malignant brain tumours, and he suspects their cellphone use, too,
is to blame.

Shattuck isn’t alone in worrying about the effects of the devices. In
May, speculation swirled that Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy’s
brain cancer was linked to habitual cellphone use. Picking up on the
rumours, cnn’s Larry King Live
devoted a show to the subject. On it, the neurosurgeon who treated US
attorney Johnnie Cochran’s brain tumour in 2005 said he would not rule
out a link between cellphones and cancer. An issue that won’t go away
had resurfaced, and concern over cellphones causing or contributing to
brain tumours went mainstream again.

The wireless industry adamantly denies the association. “The
overwhelming majority of studies that have been published in scientific
journals around the globe show that wireless phones do not pose a health
risk,” says a spokesperson for the ctia,
a heavyweight international organization that represents the
trillion-dollar wireless industry. Many scientists agree: the literature
shows little evidence of a problem.

But what if the published science doesn’t reflect what’s really
happening out there? And what if there has been a concerted effort to
shield us from the evidence that does exist? Accounts from a handful of
well-respected scientists suggest that since the mid-1990s wireless
companies have been doing their best to bury worrying findings,
discredit researchers who publish them, and design experiments that
virtually guarantee the desired results. “Biological effects are
undoubtedly there, no question, and it’s a canard to suggest that
they’re not,” says Abe Liboff, a research professor at Florida Atlantic
University, and co-editor of the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. The cellphone industry, he insists, “will use any excuse to avoid the truth.”

Even so, a new possibility is emerging. Although cellphones appear to
be safe when used sporadically, individuals who use them frequently for
more than a decade may be vulnerable. Eight population-based studies
published since 1999 indicate that heavy users are twice as likely to
develop certain types of brain tumours as infrequent users. Citing
recall bias and memory loss on the subjects’ parts, critics reject such
suggestions. Still, since cancer often takes decades to develop, other
scientists wonder whether these findings are the first faint whispers of
a public health crisis. After all, with an estimated three billion
users around the world, cellphones have become ubiquitous.

In 1995, Jerry Phillips,
a biochemist at the Pettis Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Loma
Linda, California, received a call from the head of his biomedical
research group. He and his co-workers were doing contract work for
Motorola and the US Department of Energy on the effects of
electromagnetic radiation, and Motorola, he says, needed a favour:
higher-ups had learned of a study just published by University of
Washington scientists Henry Lai and N. P. Singh showing that radio
frequency fields similar to those emitted by cellphones damaged rats’
brain cells, breaking their dna structures after just two hours of exposure. The company, Phillips says, wanted to discredit the study.

To Motorola, it didn’t make sense that a cellphone could break dna.
The ionizing radiation of X-rays and atomic bombs has enough energy to
knock around electrons and cause genetic damage. But the radiation
emitted by cellphones is non-ionizing, similar to radar, and thought to
be too weak to do genetic harm. That is, while cellphone radiation fits
within the microwave spectrum, it emits too little energy to
significantly heat tissue. So how could cellphones, Motorola’s reasoning
went, possibly affect or harm the brain?Nonetheless, Lai’s research suggested they could, and his paper
worried Motorola. Phillips recalls that the company asked him to “find
ways to put a spin on it that was favourable to them and less favourable
to Henry and N. P.” He declined, but did agree to provide Motorola with
comments on the study, and to conduct a similar trial if they were
interested.

They were. Phillips designed a comparable experiment to investigate how radiation emitted by cellphones affected dna
in cells. He tested two slightly different radiation frequencies and
exposure times, and found that in both cases the radiation did affect
the cells’ dna, albeit in significantly different ways: sometimes it increased the base level of dna
damage typically seen in cells, and sometimes it lowered it. He wrote a
report and sent it to Motorola with a note saying he wanted to publish
the results and, if the company would fund him, design studies to
further investigate his findings. A few days later, Mays Swicord, the
director of electromagnetic research at Motorola, called him.

“He started questioning a lot of the results, pointing to what he
called ‘inconsistencies in data,’ ” Phillips recalls. “I pointed out
that it’s not unusual to see, with a single chemical agent, results go
in one direction for one time period, and in the opposite direction for
another.” Phillips went on to explain to Swicord that long or heavy
exposure to a toxin can initiate a cell’s repair mechanisms, immediately
fixing the damage. A shorter or lighter exposure might cause damage,
but not enough to trigger the same repair mechanisms. In this manner,
paradoxically, the lighter dose might be more dangerous.

Swicord, who has a background in bioelectromagnetics, wasn’t
convinced. “He suggested that I consider not publishing anything and
that I do more work,” Phillips says. “And I said no. I know when the
project is done. I’ve been doing research for twenty-five years.”

Their argument went on for weeks. Eventually, says Phillips, the head
of his research group, Ross Adey, phoned him. Apparently under a lot of
pressure, and worried that his group might lose Motorola’s financial
support if he didn’t cooperate, Adey, says Phillips, “told me that if I
didn’t give Motorola what they wanted, it could be detrimental to my
career.” Phillips wouldn’t back down. “This isn’t about the group. It
isn’t about money,” he told Adey. “It’s about science.”

Phillips refused to work on any further Motorola-funded projects, and in 1998, in the peer-reviewed journal Bioelectrochemistry and Bioenergetics, he published his dna
study, which would be one of his last. That same year, the Department
of Energy stopped funding the group’s work on electromagnetic radiation
effects. Phillips left Loma Linda and moved to Colorado Springs. Today
he’s the director of the Science/Health Science Learning Center at the
University of Colorado.

Lai, the soft-spoken University of Washington scientist who published
the study that inspired Phillips’ research, has also felt outside
pressure. In a 1994 Motorola memo—obtained and published by the New
York–based Microwave News—a corporate communications employee
discussed how the company could discredit Lai’s findings. The memo
concludes, “I think that we have sufficiently war-gamed the Lai-Singh
issue, assuming the Scientific Advisory Group and ctia have done their homework.”

Shortly thereafter, an anonymous call was made to the National
Institutes of Health, the agency funding Lai’s work. The person charged
that Lai was performing experiments outside the scope of his grant. The nih looked into the allegation but told Lai to continue his research. Then, he says, the scientific advisory group created by ctia
to manage $25 million (US) in industry-donated research money sent a
letter to the president of the University of Washington demanding that
Lai and Singh both be fired. Lai wasn’t, but soon after, all
non-industry funding for related research dried up in the US. Like
Phillips, he left the field.

Swicord, now semi-retired,
admitted in an interview that he asked Phillips to collect more data,
but insisted that Motorola eventually encouraged him to publish his
findings. Similarly, the Motorola spokesperson acknowledged the “war
game” memo, but told me that the company and the wireless industry in
general have “demonstrated a strong commitment to high-quality research
in the area of the safety of radio waves.”The industry has indeed funded a number of trials on the potential
effects of cellphone radiation, but the results of those studies differ
markedly from those funded by the government or other public agencies.
In short, industry-funded research tends to show no cause for concern;
the findings of other studies suggest a need for precaution.

In a paper published last year in Environmental Health Perspectives,
Swiss researchers reported that of the studies published between 1995
and 2005, which investigated whether controlled exposure to radio
frequency radiation affected humans, 82 percent of those funded by
public agencies, and 71 percent of those funded by a combination of
industry and public money, reported that there were effects; only 33
percent of the solely industry-funded studies did. The authors point out
that scientists funded by public agencies may have an interest in
finding a response in order to secure additional funding, but Lai
doesn’t buy this argument. Having shifted his research focus to finding
cancer cures, he still follows the literature on cellphones, and has
done his own analysis of 336 published papers. Industry-funded studies,
he says, are roughly twice as likely as government-funded ones to
conclude that cellphones are harmless. Phillips is also convinced that
the industry either cherry-picks its data or designs studies to show
nothing. “A lot of the studies that are done right now are done purely
as PR tools for the industry,” he says.

Recent epidemiological
(population-based) studies comparing the cellphone habits of people
with brain tumours to healthy individuals suggest that the frequency—and
length—of use may indeed play a role in tumour development. “There’s no
indication, for people who use their phones for less than ten years, of
an association between mobile phone use and these particular cancers,”
says Lawrie Challis, former chairman of the UK’s Mobile
Telecommunications and Health Research Programme. But “knowing what
happens in the short term tells you nothing about what happens in the
long term.”

Indeed, of thirteen epidemiological studies published since 1999 on
cellphone use for more than ten years, eight suggest a two- to threefold
risk increase.

Just the same, it’s hard to publish convincing results from studies
like these. For one thing, cellphones have only been popular for a
decade or so, making it difficult to find enough subjects who’ve used
them for long periods of time. Add to this the fact that brain tumours
are rare, and it becomes almost impossible to produce data that show
definitive statistics. Of the eight epidemiological studies that suggest
a positive association, for instance, only three are large enough to be
considered “statistically significant.”

One way to circumvent these problems and acquire enough reliable data
is to pool results from multiple trials. This is the idea behind
Interphone, the largest study of its kind to date, coordinated by the
International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyons, France. Led by
Canadian scientist Elisabeth Cardis, the project has analyzed some 6,400
tumours in thirteen countries. Here, too, however, mystery abounds.
While results from some of the individual countries have been published,
the pooled results—scheduled for release in 2006—have not; Cardis says,
“The interpretation isn’t clear.” In the January/February issue of Microwave News, editor Louis Slesin writes, “The code of silence about Interphone must end. Public health demands it.”Early this year,
Siegal Sadetzki, a scientist at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in
Israel, and a participant in the Interphone study, published her
country’s arm of the findings. Their report suggests that heavy
cellphone users have a 50 percent increased risk of developing parotid
gland tumours near the side of the head against which they hold their
phones. “Significant risk is shown, and we should take this into
consideration, because this technology is really, really, really
prevalent,” she says.

While Sadetzki advocates caution (noting “usually it takes a long
time to develop solid cancers; ten years is really only the minimum”),
others maintain that a two- or threefold increase actually does not
represent a large overall risk. Malignant brain tumours are rare—about
one in 14,000 North Americans is diagnosed with one each year—and even a
doubling of the risk for individuals who use cellphones for a decade
means only about one in 7,000 people. But what about those who use
cellphones for thirty years, or kids who start using them when they’re
eight? No one knows.

Clearly, epidemiological studies in which scientists monitor the
health and cellphone habits of large groups of people over extended
periods of time are required. Properly constructed, such studies would
solve problems of memory loss, recall bias, and other research-related
challenges.

If the debate over whether cellphones are harmful is controversial, how they might be is even more so. Because cellphone radiation can’t knock around electrons enough to cause dna
damage or heat tissue, its biological effects are probably due to
something heat independent or “non-thermal.” However, no one knows yet
how the radiation could do this, and many dispute that it does. Of the
approximately 400 laboratory studies that have investigated whether
exposure to radio frequency radiation affects dna in cells and/or animals, only about half report any effects.

Leif Salford, chair of neurosurgery at Lund University in Sweden, has
repeatedly shown that exposure to two hours of cellphone radiation
opens the blood-brain barrier and causes brain-cell damage in rats.
Other studies have shown that radiation affects biological pathways
important for metabolism and stress responses. But what does this have
to do with cancer? Although cellphone radiation, unlike uranium or
plutonium, may not be powerful enough to cause tumours directly, it
might, as Jerry Phillips suggests, indirectly lead to cancer by
preventing dna repair mechanisms from working properly, and by producing free radicals, highly reactive molecules that can interact with dna in cancer-causing ways.

It may also be that cellphones don’t seed new tumours, but instead
promote or accelerate the growth of existing ones. In other words,
cellphone radiation could be what is called a “tumour promoter,” which
would require less energy than tumour initiation. (Also, as people are
already being bombarded by dozens of known environmental carcinogens,
something that helps cancers grow is potentially a big problem.) In the
first study Phillips conducted for Motorola, he used a chemical to make a
tiny tumour and then looked at how radio frequency fields influenced
its growth. “It did appear that these fields could affect already
initiated tumours,” he says. According to University of Massachusetts
Amherst toxicologist Edward Calabrese, animals and cells respond
differently and inconsistently to low-level toxic exposures, so varied
findings are not surprising. At low levels, he says, the way a body
reacts to exposures can be counterintuitive, just as in Phillips’
experiment, where low exposures appeared to cause more damage than
higher ones.

Probing these issues requires funding, but outside of the Interphone
study interest seems to be flagging. The US government, which didn’t
participate in Interphone, has not announced any plans to fund
epidemiological studies. The National Toxicology Program has provided
$22 million (US) for a series of trials to be performed at the Illinois
Institute of Technology, but these animal studies will investigate only
whether healthy rats and mice exposed to cellphone radiation develop
brain cancer—and they may not, if cellphones are only tumour promoters.

This is certainly not the first time a ubiquitous product has become a
potential public health threat, and the big question is, how will it
all play out? The cellphone industry could follow in the steps of Big
Tobacco and continue to cast doubt on legitimate studies. Or it could
adopt the science-minded approach of the automobile industry, which has
responded to obvious public health dangers by engineering new
technologies—the airbag, for instance—that minimize risk and attract the
public’s support.

In this era of Hollywood celebrities weighing in on international
affairs, perhaps a media luminary like Larry King will call for
long-term epidemiological research on the effects of habitual cellphone
use. Or maybe good soldier Daniel Shattuck will discover the truth and
broadcast it broadly; maybe he’ll find a less hesitant doctor.

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About Me

While I have always been extremely health conscious and am presently in excellent health, I did become temporarily out-of-commission (i.e. I was really sick) in 2005 with a number of at the time unexplainable symptoms. I was quite puzzled at the time because I had been eating mainly organically grown food, drinking spring water, doing Yoga every morning, and going to the gym several times a week. In other words, I was doing everything one is supposed to do to stay healthy. I was not supposed to get sick. It took me six months before discovering or even imagining the main source of the problem - which was in fact "overexposure to electromagnetic" - especially microwave - radiation. I was living within 200 meters of two cell phone towers at the time and within 500 meters of a 3rd one with numerous WiFi signals bleeding into my apartment from adjacent neighbors. I developed a host of symptoms, which are found in what has been misleadingly described as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) -- but much more accurately described as Radio Wave or Microwave Sickness. Large numbers of people in the USA suddenly started getting sick in 1984...